More Craft Brewers = More Mediocrity?

I agree that there seems to be an influx of, in my opinion, mediocre breweries. I think there are a lot of people who are really trying to capitalize on the increasing craft beer market and unfortunately many of these breweries/brewers either have kinks to work out or are just not very good at what they do...I'm not going to spend much of my money to figure out which is the case. If I visit a brewery or purchase packaged beer and I don't think the experience is worth my money, the chance of me giving said brewery another shot is pretty slim, too many good ones out there to waste my money on a shitty product.

 

As someone who lives in Maryland, I am so fucking glad you said this. Strides have been made to catch up with many other states, like having growler fills available in quite a few stores. However, most (BUT NOT ALL [hi Union!]) of the breweries popping up in my state are seemingly content with catering to the Blue Moon crowd instead of beer geeks, so our state is sorely lacking in stuff the hype train would go gaga for, like barrel-aged imperial stouts, sour ales, or insane DIPAs.

Do I miss having these beer geek staples brewed locally and be readily available to me? Well, I would like to have access to more beers that can trade for HT

 

I live in Vancouver, WA which is a small(ish) town just north or Portland, OR, which we all know has many fantastic breweries (HotD, Cascade, Breakside, Commons to name a few), so it's hard to compare some of these smaller guys. There are few Vancouver breweries that are really really good. My main issue isn't the quality or capability of the breweries, it's mostly their choices. They seem to think that because hoppy IPAs are popular, every style should be extra hoppy. Hoppy stouts, hoppy hefeweizens, hoppy ESBs, hoppy various Belgian styles, etc. I totally get that they need to cater to what they think will sell (everyones gotta eat!), but I hope that as they mature they take risks by actually not over hopping everything. That seems backwards from when US craft started...

 

Imo in CT it's only because CT is really only just starting to get a relatively large wave of new breweries. With a couple openings this week iirc the count is 32. We've beeen lucky for the large part with getting a number of great new breweries, but some of the more recent ones haven't been quite been up to par. With 14+ (off of ctmq's list) more breweries in some kind of planning stage and two opening this weekend, I'd say that batting average is bound to lower some time in the future.